Daily Times

Former President Donald Trump said in an interview posted Thursday he wants to give automatic green cards to foreign students who graduate from U.S. colleges, a sharp departure from the anti-immigrant rhetoric he typically uses on the campaign trail.

Trump was asked about plans for companies to be able to import the “best and brightest” in a podcast taped Wednesday with venture capitalists and tech investors called the “All-In.”

“What I want to do and what I will do is you graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically as part of your diploma a green card to be able to stay in this country. And that includes junior colleges too, anybody graduates from a college. You go there for two years or four years,” he said, vowing to address this concern on day one. Immigration has been Trump’s signature issue during his 2024 bid to return to the White House. His suggestion that he would offer green cards – documents that confer a pathway to U.S. citizenship – to potentially hundreds of thousands of foreign graduates would represent a sweeping expansion of America’s immigration system that sharply diverges from his most common messages on foreigners.